American Culture

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT AMERICAN CULTURE - PAGE 5

By Peter Goodman and By Peter Goodman,Special to the Sun | November 17, 2002

Most people think of Bing Crosby -- when they think of him at all -- as the ultra-square pop crooner who was overtaken by the very hip Frank Sinatra and eventually thrust aside by the raw power of rock and the growth of cynicism and distrust in American society. Almost nobody knows that the young Crosby was one of the hottest jazzmen around. He was the first singer to popularize a gentle, conversational style speckled with held notes like groans, a pioneer who traded innovations with good friend Louis Armstrong and may very well have been the single most influential American musician of the 20th century.

ROME -- When Heather Parisi fainted at the end of a dance number on a popular Italian variety show, it was reported on the front pages of Italy's leading newspapers. Wendy Windham, a blond and buxom sidekick on yet another popular variety show, was mobbed by paparazzi as she went Christmas shopping in the Piazza Navona. Justine Mattera, who does a pale impersonation of Marilyn Monroe on a talk show, is a household name in Italy. So is Randi Ingerman, who recently got her own sitcom, "Men Are All Alike."

The challenge of racial and ethnic diversity was probed yesterday by 82 Christian audiences across the country via a television hookup that included about 30 men and women meeting at Baltimore's Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation.Dr. Ann Belford Ulanov, professor of psychiatry and religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York, drew on her interpretations of patients' dreams to suggest that spiritual and physical health comes from acceptance of "the other," such as unfamiliar images of God or cultures different from one's own."

Pope John Paul II's four-day stay in Denver ended Sunday on a more conciliatory note than many observers had predicted. Rather than conclude his visit with an exclamation-point of a speech deriding American moral values, the pope addressed the 400,000 worshipers at a four-hour Mass in terms that for the most part were upliftingly pastoral.To be sure, his prepared text for the occasion included direct condemnations of abortion and euthanasia as examples of this century's "culture of death."

EARLIER THIS MONTH, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that heralds the clash of language and culture that already marks political life in parts of the United States. In 1988, voters in Arizona approved an amendment to the state's constitution requiring all the state's business be conducted in English and that state employees use only English on the job.A state worker sued, claiming the provision violated her free speech rights. Questions from the justices indicate that they are more likely to decide this case on narrow procedural grounds than on the broader issues it entails.

AMID THE comment and celebration that accompanied Bob Dylan's recent 60th birthday, few observers viewed him as part of a larger American artistic thread. Because Mr. Dylan has developed counter to the usual expectations concerning American musical artists, his most enduring qualities, the ones that link him to the traditions of American culture, have often gone unrecognized. That voice, for one. Critics and audiences have dismissed it, put off by surface roughness and lack of technical perfection.

School Success Without DiversityMinority diversity in schools is not a prerequisite for delivery of quality education to students. Schools do not need diversity; schools need to serve their communities and teach their students.When my Armenian ancestors immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s, they were a disliked minority. They established an Armenian community which became a major support system for them. They worked hard, realized the American dream and gradually became assimilated into mainstream American culture.

WHEN GOV. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. called multiculturalism "bunk" and "crap" about a year ago, you'd have thought, judging from the reaction of some folks, that he'd just taken out a lifetime membership in the Ku Klux Klan. With the advent of "ethnomathematics," maybe some of those same folks will climb down off the governor's back. But I'm getting just a wee bit ahead of the discussion I had with Ehrlich at the governor's mansion Friday. The governor rehashed that multiculturalism business so he could clarify what his views are - and aren't.

I CAME ACROSS this statement yesterday morning: "Trends are not destiny." That was a good way to start the day on which the mayor of Baltimore would announce, at long last, a new plan for Belvedere Square. "Trends are not destiny" is from a little soft-cover book called The Home Town Advantage, published by some troublemakers up in Minnesota who work at a small-business-boosting, sprawl-fighting, outside-the big-box-thinking group called the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. "When people lament the disappearance of the local bookseller or neighborhood pharmacist, too often they speak with a deep sense of resignation," author Stacy Mitchell writes.

"The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History," David charles Sloane, 293 pages, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.DEATH HAS pretty much been privatized, sanitized, professionalized and sometimes dehumanized in modern American. Dying sometimes seems old-fashioned. But despite considerable debunking and derision, the American way of death still involves plenty of pomp and lots of circumstance.We still persistently pack our dead into expensive boxes, surround them with expensive artifacts and secret them in expensive burial plots, or stash them in expensive vaults.